Local commercial and public information, e.g. price of a product, promotional ads, coupons, and public announcement, reaches end consumers through conventional printed price tags, printed ads flyers/posters, electronic display, static pages or videos, and relatively new technologies such as location based mobile APPs. These distributing and broadcasting methods serve different market sectors with established practices, yet are more or less limited for flexible adoption to meet modern precise marketing purposes, mostly technically.
Printed labels and posters are low cost, yet cost time and labor on maintenance and lack real-time refreshment capability. An electronic display serves more dynamic information and attracts attention with videos and sounds, yet it's costly in initial deployment and its location is restricted by power and network cables due to high power consumption of the LCD displays and WiFi/3G/LTE connectivity.
Recent location based mobile APPs involve positioning technologies such as GPS and iBeacon. These technologies correlate users and local information through specific APP and retrieve information from remote servers over mobile networks. While GPS is an outdoor positioning technology which could only provide rough suggestions through APPs, iBeacon's proximity based technology allows precise information pushing. The major barrier for market to adopt iBeacon is how to motivate users to download an APP and toggle on their Bluetooth. For both cases, information cannot reach users without reliable mobile networks.
Information is conventionally distributed in a one-way manner from providers to consumers. Recent technologies enable interactions through touch panels, QR code scanning and location based mobile APPs. Consumers actively acquire coupons, promotional codes and other interested information with simple clicks. iBeacon is taking off to change the marketing way to enable precise pushing and easy interaction. However, iBeacon's stand-alone and information-over-Bluetooth nature is needed to be improved for easy management, high interaction efficiency, and low consumer acceptance barriers.